Can Education Solve Tomorrow’s Problems?

If education hasn’t solved today’s problems, will it solve tomorrow’s?

Source: CDC/Unsplash

If education hasn’t solved today’s problems, will it solve tomorrow’s?

I recently watched a video from author Hank Green discussing gene editing. He questioned how far gene editing should go. There is an argument for editing genes to prevent diseases. But what about hair color? Or height? Or the especially tricky trait of intelligence? Intelligence is made up of many factors, including some specific genes, assuming we define intelligence in a way relevant to those genes. Green stated,

We don’t know right now what traits are going to be useful to the people of the future because their world is going to be different than ours.… Intelligence really is more about what we need right now from people than it is about any particular innate thing.

He gave the example of how his attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have been more of a hindrance in the past, but given current tools and support, has at times been an asset. Green concluded by saying,

If we’re designing people to be good at living in the world as it exists in one moment, we’re depriving ourselves of the diversity that will allow us to have people that will be good at living in the world as it will exist in the future. And that is not just a lesson we need to learn before genetically engineering new humans; it’s a lesson we need to learn for educating, enabling, and appreciating humans now.

As the school year proceeds, I’ve been thinking about the purpose of education. Is my goal as a professor to help my students prepare for the world as it currently is? Or for a world that doesn’t yet exist?

Our early hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved to survive and reproduce. One behavior that aided their survival was eating calorie-dense foods. The brain’s reward system evolved to respond to the taste of sweet things. Foods high in sugar were rare — much more so than they are now. Modern-day humans are still drawn to sweet things, but this trait is no longer adaptive in our environment.

We don’t have to wait for the painstakingly slow process of evolution to change human nature anymore. New technologies are being developed at unprecedented rates. We’re likely not far off from designer babies and sensory enhancement. Think of how different our world is from just 20 years ago. There are jobs today in industries that didn’t exist even five years ago. How do you prepare a generation of students for a world that is rapidly changing?

Problems the Upcoming Generations Must Prepare for

One problem facing this generation is economic instability. The cost of housing and education has skyrocketed. A larger share of house purchases is now going to investors. Media outlets have become more monopolized with just six companies controlling almost all 24-hour news stations, newspapers, publishing houses, and internet utilities. The airline industry has also consolidated where the four largest U.S. airlines control about 80 percent of total domestic passenger traffic.

The 26 richest people own as many assets as the bottom 3.8 billion.

RDNE Stock project / Pexels

Over the last few decades, wages for the lower and middle classes have stagnated and wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of the few. Productivity has gone up, yet hourly compensation has lagged. On the other side of the coin, CEO pay has increased by 1,460 percent over the last four decades. In fact, the 26 richest people own as many assets as the bottom 3.8 billion. Read that again.

We also work long hours in the United States. A new report found that the average number of working hours per year was higher in the United States than in six developed countries used in the study’s comparison: Australia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Belgium, France, and Germany. There was a joke made in an episode of "The Jetsons" that in the future we’ll be "breaking our backs" by working just three hours a day. Yet we work more hours now than those from the hunter-gatherer societies mentioned previously.

Are we creating a future of greater leisure time or greater bankrolls for billionaires?

Related to the economic conditions of the United States is our criminal justice system. The prison population has exploded since the 1980s. We have had more people incarcerated per capita than any other place on Earth since 2002. We disproportionately incarcerate minorities and those in poverty, especially after the pandemic.

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Is our educational system doing what we want it to do? The number of bachelor’s degrees has increased over the last several decades across all races and ethnicities. We are better equipped than at any other period in history to create the utopian societies early philosophers could only dream of. Are we there yet, and, if not, why not?

We have the resources to feed every human on the planet, yet hundreds of millions are undernourished. With all our innovations and advancements, we have yet to solve some of our most basic problems.

The Future of Education

So why do children go to school? Is it to gain skills to make a rich CEO richer? Perhaps some of these problems still exist because it was never the goal of education to make the world more equitable, to end world hunger, or to create world peace. Economist Joel Mokyr described the modern education system as designed to teach future factory workers to be “punctual, docile, and sober.” The structure of our educational system has largely stayed the same over the last 200 years.

Just as early educators grappled with the purpose of education, we’re left with the same questions as technology relentlessly presses on. Will we teach the working-class skills that will allow the rich to afford for their children to have designer genes of beauty and ingenuity? Will the difference in resources between the rich and poor begin to divide them, not only economically but also biologically? Perhaps we are returning to an era resembling one experienced between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens some 40,000 years ago. Will the have-nots of the future be eradicated as an inferior species akin to Neanderthals?

In a podcast interview, historian Yuval Noah Harari commented on his hopes and fears of how technology will shape our future. He noted,

There is [a] frightening scenario: that we will use the immense powers of bioengineering and artificial intelligence and so forth to try and upgrade ourselves, or try and create a new super species. And because we don’t really understand the consequences of what we are doing, it will be a downgrade. If you give, for instance, to armies and big corporations the power to re-engineer humans, they are likely to try and amplify those human qualities that they deem the most useful to them. Qualities like intelligence and discipline….Other human qualities like compassion, like artistic sensitivity, spirituality — most armies and most corporations, they don’t need spiritual employees or soldiers with a very deep sense of compassion or a deep sense of artistic beauty….This will be a terrible catastrophe.

I can’t help but think of education’s early goals to create obedient workers as I wonder what the goals of tech and business industries will be. I worry about the rhetoric surrounding education that looks only at immediate job prospects for students.

This school year, I don’t want to prepare my students to morph unquestioningly into our societal systems. I want them to leave school ready to disrupt and dismantle them. Our broken economic and criminal justice systems will not change if the goal of education is to justify the status quo. Why ask students to blindly accept their place in a system where few benefit at the expense of the many — where profits come before the health of the planet, the workers, and the sick?

May my students leave my classroom not as followers but as changemakers.